This Halloween instead of “spooky,” go for “eerie.” While spooky means fake blood and plastic bugs spread out around the house, eerie leaves room for a Halloween with sophistication. Throw away your skeleton cardboard cutout and get ready to give your house the tasteful Halloween makeover it’s been waiting for.

1. Neutral Pumpkins

While orange jack-o-lanterns tend to rot quickly, leave your pumpkins uncut and decorate its outsides instead. Instead of sticking to its natural orange, use paint to make your pumpkins great neutral accents. You can paint them black or white and cover them with lace or glitter to carry those pumpkins from Halloween decorations to November Thanksgiving décor. Whereas orange pumpkins are cute from October 25-31st, monochrome pumpkins become a timeless addition to your house.

2. Elegant Candelabras

You can buy a candelabra from a thrift store and spray paint it whatever color you want. We suggest black, but go with whatever fits in with your color scheme. No matter what color, when matched with long candles it will have an elegant effect all year. When Halloween comes, just add some fake cobwebs or let the candles stand on their own. Halloween is the time of haunted houses, which means antiques are always festive as well as being a great addition to your home.

3. Poison Toffee Apples

Toffee apples are a great part of autumn, but these aren’t the prepackaged ones you buy at the stores. These candy apples have a black coating that’s both sinister and delicious! The black caramel is a sophisticated twist on the classic toffee apple, and when you put them out they’ll perfectly coordinate with the rest of your subdued decorations.

4. Ghostly Lawn

There are lots of ways to decorate your yard for Halloween, but most of the paper decorations are cheesy and uncreative. However, ghostly dresses are both eerie and whimsical enough to have staying power. By shaping chicken wire and spray-painting it white, you can create the illusion that ghosts are dancing gently through your yard. These ghosts are bringing glamour back to Halloween.

5. Pumpkin Pie Potpourri

Another new way to utilize the seasonal pumpkin is to make pumpkin pie-scented potpourri. It’s an easy DIY: just carve, add spices, and top it off with a candle. Soon your home will be filled with the smell of pumpkin pie. There’s nothing scary about that!

6. Frightening Flowers

For your flowers, you have a couple of different options. First the optimal blossoms should be red or black, and either roses or dahlias. Both colors are beautiful, dramatic, and go with the holiday. First, you can take one of the pumpkins you painted and carve out the top to make it into a flower vase. Second, you could set the flower arrangement out in a regular vase and spread thin, fake cobwebs over the blossoms. Either way you’ll get to keep your striking centerpiece while incorporating whichever part of the holiday you want – autumnal or frightful.

7. Staircase Silhouette

Halloween has a way of making you feel like anything could be lurking in the shadows, so why not make some creepy shadows of your own? This template makes crafting a silhouette easy, and it will make your staircase part of the holiday fun! A staircase silhouette is different and intriguing, far apart from the cliché skeleton hanging from a doorway.

8. A Simple Wreath

It’s always great to have a focal point on your mantle, and October is the perfect time to display a wreath. While September is good for a wreath with autumn leaves and December is perfect for evergreen branches and holly berries, Halloween is your chance to go simple. All you need to do is grab a regular twig leaf, no cheesy skeletons or black cats needed. The branches that stick out will seem to be reaching out for you. Eek!

9. Elegant Elixirs

You don’t have to add a lot to your house to celebrate the holiday. Instead of overcrowding your mantle and tables with decorations, all you need are a few great accents. One accent that you can keep up throughout the year is an “elixir.” All it takes is an old jar full of water, tinted with yellow food coloring. Put lotus pods, poppy pods, and coneflowers inside of the jars and you have a mixture straight from a witch’s lair. The flowers will look gorgeous any time of the year, but amidst your other Halloween decorations they’ll hold a bit of peril as well.

KellyRose McAleer

KellyRose McAleer is a graduate of the University of Iowa and a writer for RemodelingCentral. Also, it’s KellyRose. It's not Kelly; It's not Rose. You can find her here